Michael Taylor

Assistant Professor of History, State University of New York at Albany
Class of 2015–2016

Michael J. Taylor is an Assistant Professor and Undergraduate Director of the Department of History at the State University of New York at Albany. Previously, he was a Lecturer of History at the University of California, Berkeley, and a Lecturer of Classics at Santa Clara University.

Michael was a 2015–2016 Postdoctoral Fellow at the Clements Center for National Security after receiving his Ph.D. in Ancient History from UC Berkeley and an A.B. in History from Princeton University. His research focuses on the Roman Republic and the Hellenistic world during the third and second centuries BC. His dissertation, a comparative study of state revenues and the military mobilizations of Rome, Carthage, and the Hellenistic kingdoms, examines these metrics of state power against the outcomes of interstate conflict. Other research interests include politics in Republican Rome, Roman military organization, and visual representations of warfare in the ancient world. While in graduate school, he served as an officer in the California Army National Guard, deploying to Iraq as a platoon leader and Kosovo as a company executive officer.